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Chet Raymo, “The Sacred Depths of Nature”; "Two Trillion Galaxies, at the Very Least”
Saturday, February 9, 2019 15:17
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“The Sacred Depths of Nature” by Chet Raymo
“NASA has released the latest and deepest look into space ever, revealing galaxies as they were 13.2 billion years ago, only 500 million years after the big bang. You will remember the Hubble Deep Field and the Ultra Deep Field. This new compilation of all the previous data is called the XDF, the Extreme Deep Field.
Now do this. Go outside at night and hold two crossed sewing pins at arm’s length again the dome of night. The intersection of those pins covers the area of the XDF. Presumably, the view in any other direction would be similar- except where our own galaxy gets in the way. Hundreds of billion of potentially visible galaxies, each galaxy (we are seeing only the brightest) with hundreds of billions of stars, every star potentially with planets. Any religion that doesn’t accommodate these incredible revelations can hardly be qualified as adequate.
Which reminds me of something I found while cleaning out the archives last week: A 1996 letter from Kent Hovind, the founder of Creation Science Evangelism and (formerly) one of nation’s busiest and most celebrated opponents of evolutionary science. I won’t say anything about Mr. Hovind; he has his problems and I wish him well. But I will quote from his letter, which is not untypical of missives I received from Christian creationists while I was writing for the Boston Globe. “Satan has used your pride to blind you to the obvious,” he writes. Hovind claims a “personal relationship with the Creator of the Universe,” and suggests that “if you [meaning me] continue to refuse and respect Him you will face Him as your judge when you die.”
I never took any of this stuff seriously. To each his own, I say, even if the sentiments don’t sound very Christian. But it does strike me as astonishing that anyone can look at the XDF, for example, understand what one is looking at, and still claim a “personal relationship” with the Creator. For myself, I don’t suppose that Mr. Hovind’s Satan, with a possibly infinite number of galaxies to attend to, has time or motive to worry about my views on evolution.”
“The scale of the universe, already unfathomable, just became even more so: There are about 10 times as many galaxies as previously thought. The new number, two trillion galaxies, is the result of work led by Christopher J. Conselice, an astrophysicist at the University of Nottingham in England, published in October in “The Astrophysical Journal.“
The team analyzed sky surveys by the Hubble Space Telescope and other instruments able to see far away, and therefore far back, through about 13 billion years of time. The astronomers formed three-dimensional models to measure the number of galaxies at different times. Because not even the Hubble or large Earth-based telescopes can see the oldest, faintest galaxies, they also did some mathematical work to come up with two trillion. “It’s much bigger than anyone would have guessed,” Dr. Conselice said. “And the real number could be even higher.”
Previous estimates were that there were perhaps 200 billion galaxies in the observable universe. One might well ask – what difference does it make? Or put another way, once you get past a couple of hundred billion galaxies, who’s counting? But the finding has important implications for understanding how the universe has evolved.
The researchers found that most of the oldest galaxies were low in mass, similar to some of the small “satellite” galaxies near our own Milky Way, and that there were about 10 times fewer low-mass galaxies today. That suggests that over billions of years, galaxies have been colliding and joining together. The study also suggests how important the more powerful James Webb Space Telescope, set to be launched in 2018, will be. “It will be able to study these galaxies that we’re just barely detecting- these lower-mass galaxies that are really the first galaxies of the universe,” Dr. Conselice said.”